1. Field of the Present Invention
The present invention relates to a system architecture for the convergence of computers and home audio/video electronics and, more particularly, to a system architecture which converges a personal computer and wireless home audio/video electronics.
2. Description of the Related Art
Personal computers (PCs) are now capable of performing many tasks once performed only by contemporary audio/video (A/V) devices. Many PCs, for example, now play back music from a CD loaded in a carousel DVD player, edit and play back audio captured by a microphone, and answer/dial telephone calls on a telephone line. More recently, PCs have been equipped with desktop video cameras which capture video for playback to the PC monitor.
It would be advantageous to converge (i.e., integrate) the PC with such home audio/video devices, but this would require that the entire house be hardwired which is both tedious work and expensive to implement. The homeowner might consider installing a network, but the software and hardware needed to support such a network is too costly. In addition, once the particular audio/video device is hardwired to a local area, it becomes difficult to move that device to another location.
Most homeowners who are faced with these drawbacks simply do without a converged system. These homeowners inevitably purchase additional A/V devices for local connection to their PCs which ironically costs them more in the long run. Further, homeowners without converged systems are plagued by a multiplicity of A/V remote control units (remotes) which are frustrating to distinguish and equally annoying to operate with success. To compound the problem, the proliferation of audio/video devices will almost certainly increase.
Homeowners will find it increasingly difficult in the future to operate a household without a converged system. As internet TVs gain in popularity due in part to high definition television (HDTV), it is foreseeable that homeowners will access the internet to accomplish household activities ranging from paying the bills electronically to cooking a recipe by following an internet video feed. Since it would be too constraining to repeatedly access the local area of the PC for all household activities, it would be advantageous if the homeowner were somehow able to access the internet from anywhere in the home.
Heretofore, there has been no practical converged system which is both easy and economical to install, allows the audio/video devices to be freely moved, and provides a common interface through which the homeowner operates the audio/video devices from anywhere in the home.